Since the turn of the century, segmented data has been used more and more effectively in both business and politics. Segmentation is commonly broken down into Demographic, Behavioral and Attitudinal data. Up until recently, most segmentation has been limited to Demographic and Behavioral. But beginning in 2008, candidate Barack Obama began to enlist the support of Silicon Valley to move into the Attitudinal segment, and continued through his presidency. In fact, the Bernie Sanders phenomenon in the 2016 election was as much due to his extensive use of attitudinal data as it was to a national swing toward socialism. It is this SAME Attitudinal data that Asymmetrical Political Solutions, LLC has to offer to its clients, and it offers the same unexpected results.

While everyone argues the "rights and wrongs" of the players protest at NFL games, I want to take a different look. In the world of politics, as it mirrors the world of retail business, we look at the "net vote consequences", meaning what is the number of votes GAINED as opposed to the number of votes LOST by a political decision. This is likely measured by polls, but finally measured in election, obviously. But the shorter term snapshot of a poll, and the trend between polls, is more telling because it is more specific to a policy or a strategy than it is in an election, because it is more isolated and thus more scientific.

With the ratings (the television semi-equivalent of a political poll) out on Sunday Night Football for Week 3 of the 2017/2018 season, we find a net decrease. "Viewershipwise, last night’s game is currently taking a 21% hit from the fast affiliates of the September 17 game, which was down 14% from the Season opener of September 10." (quoted from yesterday's Deadline Hollywood article).

Equating ratings to polls, this is the NFL/TV equivalent of a political free fall.

Like so many conservatives, I said this a hundred times. I have a weekly dinner engagement with a brilliant businessman who was and is an ardent supporter of Donald Trump. As the political "expert", he asked me what I thought each week, and I gave the litany of reasons why the Trump campaign would "nova".

And each week I grew more wrong.

My mistake, and one I will never make again, was to look at the candidate in a vacuum...the candidate without the campaign. Odd error for a guy who runs campaigns to make, but one I made enthusiastically. It took me well into the final two months before I woke up.

The 2012 Senatorial election in Massachusetts created for Republican operatives both an heartbreaking loss of a Senate seat taken just two short years previously, and a lesson of epic proportions, if we are courageous enough to learn it.

What is most painful to acknowledge is the fact that Elizabeth Warren was possibly the worst candidate ever fielded in a race of this magnitude in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in this consultant’s lifetime. The only way to describe her is to start by asking the reader a question: Does your family have an elderly aunt that no one in the family wants to have attended the family Christmas party? That elderly aunt is Elizabeth Warren.